For years cables have been used to tow instrumentation packages or hydrophone arrays behind a surface or undersea craft. While a variety of storage and deployment schemes have been tried, one of the most popular is to store the cable or array on a drum. Rotating the drum in one direction plays out the cable or array while rotating the drum in the opposite direction reels it in. As seismic explorations and military applications have imposed increased demands on the towing cables and the elongate hydrophone arrays, the stresses and sensitivities and, consequently, susceptibility to damage has increased accordingly. Care must be taken to hold stresses to a minimum. Among these stresses to be avoided are those forces acting on a cable as it extends between the ends of a winch drum and a fleeting sheave. Usually the winch drum is mounted at a relatively protected location on the deck or in a compartment and the cable is fed out through a fleeting sheave. Experience has demonstrated that the fleeting angle (the ratio of the distance from the winch drum to the fleeting sheave divided by the winch drum width) is a limiting factor to avoid the creation of excessive side forces on the cable and to allow proper level winding. When the fleeting distance/drum width is less than five-to-one, the unduly large side forces can damage the cable in a level wide system. The spacing needed to attain the five-to-one ratio is a luxury that cannot be afforded in some compact surface and undersea research vessels. There is, therefore, a continuing need in the state of the art for a cable deployment and retrieval apparatus which provides for a smaller fleeting angle to achieve reduction of stresses on the cable and which also reduces the in side loading in the level wind system.